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thadk

390 karma · joined March 3, 2009

tuning global tech pulse toward int'l tech development. Working in ICT from '07 in East Africa (Tanzania) and later West Africa (Liberia).
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thadk··on Reliable 25 Gigabit Ethernet via Thunderbolt
Does this manufacturer's practice pattern of repackaging data center components (e.g. Mellanox) imply any up and coming product creation opportunities?
thadk··on The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)
On two separate instances 4 years apart in Liberia, the VSAT unit and Asus WiFi router were overheating at peak usage or peak heat times. This must be happening more than is generally realized.

Easiest solution: permanently point a good case-fan-sized USB fan on to the unit, using its own USB port.

thadk··on I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
this Nov video talks thru via Cursor renegotiation, how in important ways a token != a token (not even within types like reasoning, output, or a model) because attention can lead to expensive logic loops. https://www.oreilly.com/videos/live-with-tim/0642572259488/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXMO2dW0LI&list=PL055Epbe6d...
thadk··on Tao Te Ching – Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
Glad it was a helpful remix! Since that post, the original tool author added UKLG's full version to the tool: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh,uklg/sectio...
thadk··on Apple Creator Studio
The main thing about Freeform that has been useful is that it has been a https://infinitecanvas.tools without a lock-in subscription.
thadk··on What the heck is going on at Apple?
Could be Fadell, why else would Apple put Thread in phones? Maybe iTunes Store (via Fuse) and iPhone (via General Magic) weren't the only things Fadell had pitched Jobs on when the time was right.
thadk··on Anthony Bourdain's Lost Li.st's
It seems like li.st was founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._J._Novak#The_List_App — unlikely to show on HN but maybe someone knows him.
thadk··on Venn Diagram for 7 Sets
Here's a very rough interactive on more recently published 7-way and 11-way venn: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/venn (with clean-ish svg, cites)

This fork shows an older version with all the shapes turned on and filled with original colors: https://observablehq.com/d/4a5120e490fa9da4

Santiago Ortiz's venn was from 2013 (via archive.org) . I had forgotten I'd seen that, thanks for sharing.

thadk··on The zipper is getting its first major upgrade in 100 years
Huh, reading the spec sheet, the hem line at the bottom of these has to be quite thin like the rest of the zipper-proximate area.

You can note on each of the 3 example garments and in the comment near them that the double thick sewn hem has to end near the new "zipper" design.

thadk··on Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
Imagine a PhD mortally terrified of exceptions!

Now I see why Karpathy was talking of RL up-weights as if they were a destructive straw-drawn line of a drug for an LLM's training.

thadk··on Seeing like a software company
It seems to me the next opportunity for Sean is to integrate this logic with The Goal (1985) extended universe of works.
thadk··on Air pollution directly linked to increased dementia risk
I tried the cheap IKEA model and with my severe dust mite allergies the model was insufficient in comparison to calm my sixth sinus-bound sense.

My main suspicion: In my last 3 abodes with pre-1955 construction in East Coast, the pre-filter on the top Wirecutter pick needs to be cleaned 3x per carbon filter replacement in order to reduce largest particle accumulation on the carbon or HEPA filters.

The inexpensive IKEA model did not have a viable and easily cleaned pre filter as far as I could figure out.

thadk··on Blurry rendering of games on Mac
How's factorio?
thadk··on Rules by which a great empire may be reduced to a small one (1773)
Sometimes the original typesetting is helpful to understand these kinds of artifacts: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_rules-for...
thadk··on Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)
Illich's 1983 Japan talk seems to be in response to McLuhan's 1971 convocation talk where he critiques Illich: https://mcluhan-studies.artsci.utoronto.ca/v1_iss5/1_5art3.h... (The spacing on this document I'm linking is hideous. Excerpts inlined below, paragraph breaks my own)

Both talks center "enterprise" and communication. Thanks Claude for validating my hunch about the late-century subtweet.

> What has happened today is that there is a new hidden ground of all human enterprises, namely a world environment of electric information, and against this new environment the old ground of 19th century hardware—whether at school or factory, whether of bureaucracy or entertainment—stands out as incongruous.

...

> It is this situation that Ivan Illich addresses himself to in Deschooling Society. He is vividly aware of the irrelevance of current curricula, drills and certification. He knows that these can no longer help us relate to the new world, and he frankly appeals to the forms of preliterate, and even prenatal experience as models for the training now needed.

> As Coleridge said "If you wish to acquire a man's knowledge, first start with his ignorance." Illich is unaware—I'll repeat: Illich is ignorant of the new all-inclusive "surround" of electric information which has enveloped man, but it is his instinctive response to this new ground that in some measure validates the figure-image he suggests for the new school. For example, he says "Since most people today live outside industrial societies. Most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes, you till the soil once you become useful: before that you watch sheep; if you are well nourished you should be useful by 11, and otherwise by 12."

> Illich relates this story: "Recently I was talking to my night-watchman, Marcos, about his 11 year old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a nino. Marcos answered with a guileless smile, 'Don Ivan, I guess you are right.' I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons." What Illich has in mind, although he does not state it, is that childhood was unknown in the Middle Ages and was a renaissance invention that came in with printing, and is ending very rapidly now in the television age...

thadk··on We're not innovating, we're just forgetting slower
idk, if you're going to center that good old TI computer, you gotta contrast the Conways law of that company, and the semi-solo person sharing 'grammable tidbits. The desired carrying capacity lies in that institution. Today it's in Shenzhen.

But the ~1980s corporation is no longer and it was driven by the hype cycle too, it's just not a recognizable one. You can google the adverts or read Soul of a New Machine.

thadk··on Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)
I hadn't heard of that one, thanks: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details
thadk··on Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)
Anyone have tips on how to avoid having the WhatsApp app on your phone?
thadk··on Run LLMs on Apple Neural Engine (ANE)
Sounds like M2-era onward have bfloat16: https://eclecticlight.co/2024/01/13/how-m1-macs-may-lag-behi...
thadk··on We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15B Miles Away [video]
“Hello world” takes on new dimensions in this context.
thadk··on Ketones Reverse Brain Aging During Midlife Critical Window
Been on the diet for most of 30’s. The benefits can be great if you can eat real food and keep up the electrolytes too. There is just no safety margin left in the body if you can’t satisfy metabolic needs on the intense diet for a few days, and don’t want to drop it, which has its own flu-like costs. The author’s trial could hold a solution: keep the insulin safety margin while supplementing the helpful ketones.

Then my question, what are the standards involved in producing the ketones to keep them safe?

thadk··on Global population datasets systematically underrepresent rural population
The gridded population tools I've used, including Worldpop, seemed to start with the national census data. Only with that do they use the various other measures as a way to subdivide the census data administrative units.

I'm not sure if any of the mentioned gridded population tools are substantially census independent. Haven't read the paper yet, but maybe that could be one reason why methods are so similar.

thadk··on Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads
Here's my messy list of all the apps I recognized in that Google Sheet: meetup, tinder, crunchyroll zynga/wordswithfriends, Microsoft Outlook com.microsoft.office.outlook, Weather channel, Microsoft 365 (Office) com.microsoft.office.officehubrow Opera Mini browser beta com.opera.mini.native.beta, BuzzFeed - Quizzes & News com.buzzfeed.android Tetris® Block Puzzle com.playstudios.tetris4 Sonic the Hedgehog™ Classic com.sega.sonic1px Grindr Flipboard: The Social Magazine Flightradar24 | Flight Tracker Bejeweled Blitz com.ea.BejeweledBlitz_row FarmVille 3 – Farm Animals Plants vs Zombies™ 2 com.ea.game.pvz2_row SimCity BuildIt 913292932 Tetris® 1491074310 Opera Mini: Fast Web Browser com.opera.mini.native TuneIn Radio: Music & Sports 418987775 Yahoo Mail – Organized Email com.yahoo.mobile.client.android.mail Angry Birds 2 com.rovio.baba Skip-Bo 1538912205 CamScanner - PDF Scanner App com.intsig.camscanner Rakuten Viber Messenger com.viber.voip Candy Crush Saga 553834731
thadk··on A life that added up to something (Obituary of Paul Erdòs)
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998) is a favorite read of mine 25 years later.
thadk··on WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill
Could Arrow be a part of the shared memory solution in another context?
thadk··on Apple acquires Pixelmator
Apple got scared: if Canva moves Affinity Suite to the web then that makes Apple computers less valuable unless you pay up for Adobe Creative Suite.

Affinity Photo is a bit too powerful for the client-side web right now but within the next couple years it's plausible. Photoshop already works in the full-stack browser well. Just a bit of Canva engineering away.

thadk··on M4 MacBook Pro
The biggest difference I’ve seen is iPad Sidecar mode works far more reliably with the M3 Max than the M1 Max. There have been incremental improvements in speed and nits too, but having Sidecar not randomly crash once a day once on M3 was very nice.
thadk··on Evolutionary history of the fruits we commonly eat
These trees often gives good generic bearings for allergies and other aspects of life.

See also: the garden's evolutionary history: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/garden

and the make-your-own evolutionary history using pyodide and the python ETE3 library: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/life

thadk··on Why does FM sound better than AM?
This short piece reminds me of a thread about the The Hedgehog and the Fox essay (1953) https://twitter.com/strangeattracto/status/13506001425970544...

> The idea of code switching between multiple traditions doesn’t seem to occur to a person who is fixated on The One True Aesthetic.

thadk··on Infineon's CO2 Sensor Monitors Indoor Air Quality
I believe Aranet4 contains this NDIR optical sensor https://www.co2meter.com/collections/sensors/products/006-0-...
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